What you realize after being here a while (and reading newspapers), is that India is essentially contantly fighting several civil wars on her vast and various territorial and ideological fronts. Allow me to list a few of the conflicts currently occuring in Mother India:
a) There are a handful of seperatist movements blowing things up in the Eastern States, throughout the state of Orissa, In Bihar, and of course the big toad of them all, Kashmir.
b) There's the Naxalites and their imitators, who claim communism as a banner but are basically unemployed, illiterate and starving young village men given arms by fat rich guys with political aspirations. Oh wait...isn't that communism? :)
c) There are the various arms and factions of the ultra-conservative Hinduvta movements. These folks are basically pissed that India is still pretending to be a secular state, and would prefer it become the world's largest exclusively Hindu power. They like to do things like beat up girls who go out for a drink without a male chaperone, blow up and/or burn down mosques and churches, barricade vital transport links to force changes to the Constitution, etc.
d) There's the strictly caste-motivated violence, like when a group of young Dalits (untouchables) gets desperate enough to riot and loot a business district. And then there's the reprisals...
e) ...by the cops, who will kick anyone's ass for enough cash.
f) There's the border with Pakistan, the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and the Indian Research and Analysis Wing (RAW)...and who the fuck knows what THEY'RE up to??
Now, during an election, everyone is vying for a little sliver of the power-pie. Home-made bombs can be bought for ten rupees (25cents) on streetcorners in Bihar. Why? Because in India (as elsewhere), the politicians have realized that the middle classes are great for fundraising, but really the only way to win is to coerce huge blocks of the poor into voting. Here's how that works:
It's around six months before an election. Lets say some rich dude in a poor, rural region wants to win a seat in Lok Sabha, the Indian Parliament. We'll call him Dude A (for brevity). Dude A gathers up a few nice people in khakis and tucked-in shirts, and has them go slum-to-slum and village to village, offering a few rupees, maybe some new blankets, etc: "No, no! It's just a simple gift, we don't want anything, we don't expect anything. Just please remember Dude A around voting time." Easy.
But Dude A is clever. He knows Dudes B-Z are also born-again philanthropists around this time. So Dude A gets in touch with another group, or maybe two or three groups. One of these groups is notorious for bombing mosques, another for sabotaging highways, another for extorting money from the middle class. Dude A says: 'Here's some cash. Crank it up a bit. I need some issues to highlight my true heroism." And they do. Suddenly -Whoa!- bad shit begins to get worse: a bus carrying a group of Hindu pilgrims explodes; there's gunfire in a Muslim market. Folks are getting frightened, and -better- angry: we knew they were not to be trusted, it's them, those fucking bastards, lets get them. There are a few riots, some shops torched, a near-lynching.
Now Dude A is fucking psyched: he makes a few speeches, rallies against the incumbent, promises water wells, security, electricity, maybe even new schools and clinics. But these are old promises , the people need something tangible, help us, help us; Dude A calls in the goondas and says: "Tone it down for a bit". At the same moment he calls in the cops (goondas in uniform) and says "Here's some cash, lets clean up." So now it's a state-sanctioned pogrom against anyone who openly opposes his election. Plus, for good measure, the cops tear through the villages and slums shitkicking people at random, just to show they're not fucking around. The Muslims get most of the stick: they're a minority, they can't effect the outcome of the vote. Now Dude A calls in the men in clean clothes. He sends them back to the villages, back to the slums, to remind everyone that Dude A was there for them, he cares, he supports the people, he keeps his promises, here's some free rice, some propane...please vote next week.
Next week rolls around. Dude A thinks he has an entire region "locked up" (that's what the papers call it). But he's paraniod, Dudes B-Z have been making gains. OK, another tactic. Dude A gathers a group of his favourites, say ten loyal meatheads. He gives them the Election Census Reports that he bought from his buddy in Delhi. The report lists who voted for who in the previous election. Now he has a neat little list of all his party's non-supporters. He sends the goondas out into the streets. They split into teams of two-three. In a day they can maybe terrorize -what?- one, two hundred households each?
Voting day! Let the voice of the people ring true! Dude A has a giant hard-on. But alas, his bummer paranioa kicks in again. His main rival, the incumbent, has locked up a large village here, a well-populated slum there. It could be close: time to play the ace. Dude A visits the Regional Voting Superviser. Oh look! It suddenly seems that entire village has already voted -for Dude A! And the people at the voting booth, voting by little symbols because they can't fucking read, are being turned away: "No, sorry, you've already voted, you can't vote twice!". And who's that other guy there, the one writing down the name of everyone as they vote? He's Dude A's good buddy, who will hand in a list of everyone in Dude A's territory who has failed to vote. Maybe next time they won't be so lazy...
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Dylan's Coming! Dylan's Coming!
Yay!
This afternoon we leave Jaipur for Delhi. Not much worthwhile to say about Jaipur, so I won't say anything.
Fresh little Dylan is going to get his (poor language edited for Mom-in-Law) ASS KICKED! (in the best India-only way) We've planned an audacious, hectic, exhausting and thoroughly wonderful two weeks across the Gangetic Basin on our way up to Nepal. We will:
- See the sun rise and set on the Taj Mahal
- Admire the sculpted Kama-Sutra scenes of orgies and beastiality in the temples of Kuajaro
- Tangle with a large kitty on a tiger-watching safari
- Confront the ancient spirituality of Varanasi, one of the holiest cities in Hinduism
- Take in the Buddha's birthday festival in Lumbini, his birthplace.
A few things to keep in mind here:
1) This is the most heavily touristed region in India, particularly by folks on group tours. In regions heavy with group tours (nothing wrong with that, everyone gets old yeah?) and tourists in general, prices tend to creep up, touts and vendors get more bold and eventually become convinced that every tourist is a blubbering idiot out to piss away money as quickly as possible (one story has a Swedish couple paying 2000 rupees for a samosa. That's twice our daily budget, or about $50.00 CDN). Sooner or later, the entire economy of a town comes to rely on easy tourist moolah. Say "Welcome my friend..." to every hungry hustler, swindler, cheat, thief, and liar within a hundred mile radius (and in India, that's ALOT of people). It's a circus, and you're the itchy bearded lady looking haggard under the lights.
2) The Gangetic Basin is just that: a huge basin, formed by the shifting floodplains of the mighty Ganges over eons. This time of year its a hot (40-45 degree) dusty bowl, where pollution pools so thick the sun never rises or sets against a horizon, it simply sinks watery-eyed into a noxious pillow of brown-yellow particulate.
3) The states we will be crossing are some of the most poorest and most populated in India.
4) There's a national election on! Contrary to what you may have heard, India is not "an extremely tolerant nation, where all religions and ethnicities live together in loving peace and harmony". During quiet times, sustained mutual indifference would better characterize the relationship than community fraternity. There's a reason why neighbourhoods in even India's 'modern' cities are divided along caste and religious lines...and it ain't purely historical.
Uhhh...so what was I saying? Right: Dylan's coming, and we're pysyched!
This afternoon we leave Jaipur for Delhi. Not much worthwhile to say about Jaipur, so I won't say anything.
Fresh little Dylan is going to get his (poor language edited for Mom-in-Law) ASS KICKED! (in the best India-only way) We've planned an audacious, hectic, exhausting and thoroughly wonderful two weeks across the Gangetic Basin on our way up to Nepal. We will:
- See the sun rise and set on the Taj Mahal
- Admire the sculpted Kama-Sutra scenes of orgies and beastiality in the temples of Kuajaro
- Tangle with a large kitty on a tiger-watching safari
- Confront the ancient spirituality of Varanasi, one of the holiest cities in Hinduism
- Take in the Buddha's birthday festival in Lumbini, his birthplace.
A few things to keep in mind here:
1) This is the most heavily touristed region in India, particularly by folks on group tours. In regions heavy with group tours (nothing wrong with that, everyone gets old yeah?) and tourists in general, prices tend to creep up, touts and vendors get more bold and eventually become convinced that every tourist is a blubbering idiot out to piss away money as quickly as possible (one story has a Swedish couple paying 2000 rupees for a samosa. That's twice our daily budget, or about $50.00 CDN). Sooner or later, the entire economy of a town comes to rely on easy tourist moolah. Say "Welcome my friend..." to every hungry hustler, swindler, cheat, thief, and liar within a hundred mile radius (and in India, that's ALOT of people). It's a circus, and you're the itchy bearded lady looking haggard under the lights.
2) The Gangetic Basin is just that: a huge basin, formed by the shifting floodplains of the mighty Ganges over eons. This time of year its a hot (40-45 degree) dusty bowl, where pollution pools so thick the sun never rises or sets against a horizon, it simply sinks watery-eyed into a noxious pillow of brown-yellow particulate.
3) The states we will be crossing are some of the most poorest and most populated in India.
4) There's a national election on! Contrary to what you may have heard, India is not "an extremely tolerant nation, where all religions and ethnicities live together in loving peace and harmony". During quiet times, sustained mutual indifference would better characterize the relationship than community fraternity. There's a reason why neighbourhoods in even India's 'modern' cities are divided along caste and religious lines...and it ain't purely historical.
Uhhh...so what was I saying? Right: Dylan's coming, and we're pysyched!
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Brains for Breakfast
Yup. It was called a "Brain-Egg Fry." So I envisioned a skillet kinda thing, with egg, potato, a few peppers, and maybe a little brain here and there. Nope. It should been called "Egg Pouch O' Brain." It was a whole fucking brain wrapped in a greasy omlette, all squigly and shuddering. And brain from what?! Maybe goat, I never found out. So what's brain like? Like super-rich, greasy, fatty grisle. You don't even need to chew it, it just kinda dissolves and slides down your throat, except for the part where the spine attaches, which is more...tendony. And yes, I finished it. This kind of thing is all in the head.
Craft Industry, Street Vendors
A fantastic way to spend a morning is to seek out the 'Old City' and wander wide-eyed in twisted lanes, some barely wide enough for two people to pass abreast, stopping to watch a blacksmith shape a copper pot, or a group of women making roti on the local temple stoop. The boundaries of personal and public space are lived much differently than in the West. Some of these neighbourhoods have been around for centuries, well before gridded street planning and the boring tyranny of right angle construction. Fronting the lanes are small specialist trades and crafts whose skills have likely been passed down through the family in accordance with ancient jati (similar to caste) identities.
On the outskirts of every major urban center there are large Western-style air-conditioned malls for the Indian middle classes. But I read a newspaper article about how these malls are slowly going bankrupt as even middle class families choose to return to the small-scale producers with whom they have a more intimate relationship. It's interesting to think about how the skills of similar small-scale producers have largely vanished in the West, or else have become up-market niche commodities whose distinction is the simple fact they are produced by hand; a process similar to the trendy rise of 'organic' produce that is completely unaffordable for most ("Twelve dollars for a loaf of bread? Sure, I'll buy two!"). Nostalgia sells. Its also interesting to think about the relationship between industry and neighbourhood, and how it's different to have your shops located below your houses rather than cordoned off in an 'industrial' area away from housing centers.
The photo above is a block-printer's shop. He presses ink into fabric using carved wooden blocks with a variety of patterns and shapes.
Copper pot making shop, Rajasthan.
Woodworking shop, Rajasthan.
Shoe vendor, Rajasthan.
Milk vendor. Milk is collected in the morning, and the vendors cycle it in these tanks to the various shops and restaurants as needed.
Woman with spice-scales, Rajasthan.
Tailors, Rajasthan.
Collecting the laundry from the laundry-wallah under the stairs, Mumbai.
Beach vendor, Chowpatty Beach, Mumbai.
Sidewalk cobbler, Mumbai.
A morning street-shave, Mumbai.
Ice is delivered throughout the city by these guys, who pull their carts around yelling "Ice! Fresh cold ice! Clean ice here!" This is why we tend to avoid the fruit slushy-cones from street vendors.
Need a knife sharpened? The dude on the grinding-wheel-attached-to-the-bicycle-crank can help, when he's not translating the Ramayana into Russian.
The Answer...
...to the socio-economic situation in contemporary India is this:
"Personal income tax-the most common form of redistributive taxation- is paid by only 2% of India's urban population, and economic reforms have continued to evade the issue of taxing agricultural wealth and incomes." Sunil Khilnanai, The Idea of India, p. 103.
Yeah: essentially nobody here pays any tax whatsoever. No money for schools, roads, bridges, hospitals, welfare programs, elder care, emergency shelters, etc.
Oh, but it's just little Susie's Karma...to be sold off to a beggar's pimp because her parents can't afford the burden of another dowry. Tough cosmic luck, Susie. Better be a good little girl in this life so maybe you'll get reborn as a loyal housewife in the next.
In my harsher moods, I would say you reap socially what you sow economically.
Incidentally, for a cure to looking at India with rose (or was that saffron?) coloured glasses ("It's so shanti-shanti maaan...so profound and spiritually in tune...etc) I recommend the following reads.
1) The abovementioned The Idea of India by Sunil Khilnani. A collection of essays on contemporary politics and economics.
2) Maximum City by Suketu Mehta. The author returns to his childhood home of Bombay to find much has changed. Especially interesting for its analysis of the rise of the Shiv Sena, and the political origins of the world's largest slums.
3) The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. Fiction. Read it; it's a day of your time.
"Personal income tax-the most common form of redistributive taxation- is paid by only 2% of India's urban population, and economic reforms have continued to evade the issue of taxing agricultural wealth and incomes." Sunil Khilnanai, The Idea of India, p. 103.
Yeah: essentially nobody here pays any tax whatsoever. No money for schools, roads, bridges, hospitals, welfare programs, elder care, emergency shelters, etc.
Oh, but it's just little Susie's Karma...to be sold off to a beggar's pimp because her parents can't afford the burden of another dowry. Tough cosmic luck, Susie. Better be a good little girl in this life so maybe you'll get reborn as a loyal housewife in the next.
In my harsher moods, I would say you reap socially what you sow economically.
Incidentally, for a cure to looking at India with rose (or was that saffron?) coloured glasses ("It's so shanti-shanti maaan...so profound and spiritually in tune...etc) I recommend the following reads.
1) The abovementioned The Idea of India by Sunil Khilnani. A collection of essays on contemporary politics and economics.
2) Maximum City by Suketu Mehta. The author returns to his childhood home of Bombay to find much has changed. Especially interesting for its analysis of the rise of the Shiv Sena, and the political origins of the world's largest slums.
3) The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. Fiction. Read it; it's a day of your time.
The Pauper's Throne
This is a toilet on an Indian train. Click on the photo to enlarge it! Notice the 'toilet' is essentially a hole with two kinda cute little 'footpads' to place your feet when you squat. Keep in mind the train is thundering at 80km/hr, pitching back and forth erratically. It is also around 45 degrees Celsius. Notice the nice little tap down there! This is to gently rinse the poo off your fingertips, or your entire left hand if you're as ambi-dexterous as I. Notice the complete lack of soap! What an ingenious little system!
aside aside
So as Day mentioned below, we're both feeling some traveller burnout. Last night we took a cross desert night train (11:00PM-4:30AM) which we both actually slept soundly on. We woke covered in a film of fine red dust and sand, shook off, grabbed a little pot of chai tea (the milk had burned, a shame), and headed of into the darkness to find a bed. You can do that here: wander around semi-lost through unlit streets with huge backpacks, stepping over people sleeping in stoops as you bang on shuttered doors to wake the night watchman at some anonymous strip motel. Maybe not in the Downtown East-side, but here, yes.
India has two kinds of hotels: the ones dolled up for the tourist trade, often in pretty old buildings with staff who speak great English. They can be quite cheap, especially in the off-season as the desert is now, approaching summer, with the smarter tourists retreating to the Northern hills. The trade-off is that the food in these districts is almost always monstrous and over-priced. The second kind of hotel is what we're bunked down in now: a massive faceless concrete cube, plopped right on the busiest street in front of a transport hub. These hotels are intended for the Indian business traveller. They range from fetid and musty deathtraps to...way out of our price range. The advantage is they are surrounded by cheap, fresh, local food joints: the chai shops, sweet shops, and veg restaurants where two can get full for less than two dollars.
So, rather than rushing off to see the amazing ancient fort this town apparently has, we spent the day lazing under the fan reading, writing, and wandering from cheap eatery to cheap eatery. Tomorrow: likely the same.
There's a photo in a climbing mag I remember. It shows some dude, way up there, leaning out of his soaked portaledge, looking down. He's got that classic shit-scared what-now look. There's obviously been some weather: thick cloud in the background, the rock streaked cold grey with rain. The caption reads: "If you're wondering what you're doing up there, maybe its time to come down."
The caption precisely misses the point: sometimes you go up there because you're not sure if you can finish, and that question alone is compelling. Maybe you go simply because being in that position, that stark, commanding verticality, puts you in such a strange and foreign place that the mundane requires constant recalibration. So you go up there because you want to wonder what the fuck you're doing; want to feel the desire -the need- to quit, go down, have a beer, take it easy, get back to normal.
Maybe long-term travel is a little like that.
India has two kinds of hotels: the ones dolled up for the tourist trade, often in pretty old buildings with staff who speak great English. They can be quite cheap, especially in the off-season as the desert is now, approaching summer, with the smarter tourists retreating to the Northern hills. The trade-off is that the food in these districts is almost always monstrous and over-priced. The second kind of hotel is what we're bunked down in now: a massive faceless concrete cube, plopped right on the busiest street in front of a transport hub. These hotels are intended for the Indian business traveller. They range from fetid and musty deathtraps to...way out of our price range. The advantage is they are surrounded by cheap, fresh, local food joints: the chai shops, sweet shops, and veg restaurants where two can get full for less than two dollars.
So, rather than rushing off to see the amazing ancient fort this town apparently has, we spent the day lazing under the fan reading, writing, and wandering from cheap eatery to cheap eatery. Tomorrow: likely the same.
There's a photo in a climbing mag I remember. It shows some dude, way up there, leaning out of his soaked portaledge, looking down. He's got that classic shit-scared what-now look. There's obviously been some weather: thick cloud in the background, the rock streaked cold grey with rain. The caption reads: "If you're wondering what you're doing up there, maybe its time to come down."
The caption precisely misses the point: sometimes you go up there because you're not sure if you can finish, and that question alone is compelling. Maybe you go simply because being in that position, that stark, commanding verticality, puts you in such a strange and foreign place that the mundane requires constant recalibration. So you go up there because you want to wonder what the fuck you're doing; want to feel the desire -the need- to quit, go down, have a beer, take it easy, get back to normal.
Maybe long-term travel is a little like that.
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